CAREY G. MUMFORD

PROFESSIONAL SKETCH

In the midst of a professional career of more than fifty years, mostly in hospital chaplaincy, Carey Mumford's last 20 have been directed primarily toward helping with the development of the knowledge and skill of those who manage, teach and play the game of golf. His extensive portfolio in counseling, education and human services transferred seamlessly into changing vocational arenas.

Just prior to a full-scale focus on golf, he spent five years developing human resources for a major Sunbelt resort/recreation developer. There he was responsible for training management and sales staff. The emphasis in those programs often led to his being sought out by golf professionals, club managers and others associated with the game for help with their various tasks, particularly those requiring the understanding of human behavior and the skills of self-management and stress reduction.

At the invitation of the PGA of America, and from their program's inception, he served on the faculty of the Advanced Business School until it was discontinued in favor of Stanford U's creation of a GPT program. He remains part of the continuing education program. In addition, he conducts playing and teaching clinics and workshops across the country and in Canada, and regularly coaches amateur and professional players, assisting them with the mental skills that influence building and playing the game.

He also continues to assist corporate groups with both systems and human resources issues, concerns and developmental needs.

With PGA Professionals Tim Tague of Tague Golf in Indianapolis, IN and Larry Shute of Crossville, TN, he created KeyGolf. The KeyGolf mission is dedicated to learning, teaching, and playing in the context of balance in the mental and physical aspects of the game. KeyGolf combines the principles and basic methodologies required both by sports (golf, in particular) and management behaviors and practices. Both Tague and Shute are Life members of PGA and Shute is a Master professional.

Currently, Carey Is also the Director of Game enhancement for Bird Golf Academy with sites in Denver, Phoenix, Crossville, and coming to Florida and California. He was invited to be a featured contributor to the 2000 official guide to Junior Golf - "Golf, The Game for Life," with his monograph on "Reaching the Fourth Dimension in Golf."

He has also taught and coached in PGA Junior schools in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, California and Montana and college golf programs at Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee Tech, Brevard Community College, West Point, Louisville, Vanderbilt and Miami, as well as working with individual coaches and players from other schools.

In their special issue on the mental game in 1990, Golf Magazine placed him among the top dozen golf psychologists in the country, and Golf World Magazine devoted two pages to his second book, "The Double Connexion," in the Pro-Report section of their June 19, 1992 issue.

His work is extensively used in books by Michael Hebron ("The Art and Zen of Learning Golf") and Phil Ritson ("Golf Your Way"), both of whom are listed among the top 100 golf teachers in the country. Mumford's work is also the content of the fourth tape in the Ritson series called "The Encyclopedia of Golf," as well as the core of mental game teaching at all of the Phil Ritson/Mel Sole Golf Schools around the country.

His unique approach to the mental game has earned wide acceptance among both US and Canadian PGA golf professionals, largely because it goes beyond "what" ought to happen and implements the process that teaches "how" it is actually carried out. By integrating principles of behavior, psychology and physiology, and removing unnecessary complications, he gives the teacher and player "user-friendly" resources to reshape widely held, though misleading, notions that have caused many players to "shoot themselves in the foot."

His two books, GOLF'S BEST KEPT SECRET and THE DOUBLE CONNEXION, describe the context of "playing the game within yourself" and the natural principles and processes essential to the balance and integration of mental and manual skills. In these pages, he shows how players can move naturally, and without hindrance, from the practice tee to the golf course. The applications to life and work are equally present also. It was the cross-currents of common denominators in these seemingly dissimilar arenas that stimulated both books. Additionally, he applies his skill to areas of training and education that include family life enrichment for golf professionals, training and developing pro-shop staff, training golf course marshals, and workshops for coaches and professional instructors.

Carey Mumford is a graduate of Wake Forest University and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. His strong training and counseling background, balanced and supported by his thorough familiarity with physiological principles, have allowed him to understand the mutual effect of mind-on-body and body-on-mind that touches everything we do, and to integrate the basic principles into an orderly process for learning, teaching and playing the game. The same is true of his approach to management development and training.

Over the past fifteen years, he has faced more than 22,000 of the Class A Member Professionals of the PGA, conducted in excess of 200 clinics for amateurs and professionals in 30 states and Canada, and worked individually with more than 100 players on the PGA, LPGA, Seniors, Nike, TC Jordan, Hooters, Futures, and Mini Tours.

He lives with his wife, Janice, an RN, in Crossville, TN, on the Cumberland Plateau, in the area popularly referred to as the Golfing Capital of Tennessee. He and Janice have three sons and five grandchildren.